i don't use pandora or spotify or any of those online music services. i torrent albums from pirate bay, and then if i like them, i purchase them from amazon. sometimes i just buy the mp3s, but i also buy physical albums. whenever possible, i buy the albums at concerts because that way the band gets all the money from the sale.

/Unless of course if it is for radio streaming which Shoutcast is good at

I remember listening to Shoutcast almost 10 years ago.. didn't know it was still around.

I miss Launchcast. Twas a great service before Yahoo purchased them.

What the hell is the deal with Yahoo? Why do they insist on using their own media players, and why don't any of them work worth a damn?

Yahoo likes to buy things, fark them up, then shut them down losing millions in the process. Yahoo seems to not care about making money. I think Yahoo wants to beat WWE's Vince McMahon's record of losing the most money possible

I will say this for Spotify - despite its quirks and kind of awful interface I'm deeply in love with it. There is truly nothing better than having nearly anything you want to listen to at your finger tips. Example: tonight I was layin around reading, listening to a cutesy indie pop band, briefly looked on their wikipedia, read about the new band of one of their ex-members, immediately found that band and listened to their absolutely amazing-mindblowingly-good second album thanks to the beauty of Spotify.

For Pandora, they received $0.21 for 7800 plays, which equates to $0.002 per play.On radio, they receive $0.005 per play, and he is biatching about the difference.

Lets think about that. With a traditional radio station, he would have received 20 cents more for the same number of plays. With Pandora, 7800 plays equals access to 7800 listeners. Each radio play is between say 500 and 100,000 listeners. Does it even dawn on him that this may be the difference? Nope. Thick headed. Does he realize no small band is making a living off radio royalties? Does he think the Rolling Stones do concerts because they are bored? Does he realize that Pandora and its ilk are offering promotion of his album with one click access to purchase?

This guy is freaking thick. Here is a business model that is promoting small bands directly to targeted audiences, and paying royalties at 50% of what the broad brush radio stations are paying. Not to mention, online radio is telling people what the song and band names are, lyrics, and giving them the opportunity to purchase the music.

Pandora has opened me up to a lot of new bands, and I have been buying a lot more new music. I hope shortsighted idiots don't screw it up. Or Amazon with their $%#ed up new cloud player downloads that just make it more difficult for me to give them money for something.

moothemagiccow:Is anyone comfortable buying music from say, bandcamp or soundcloud?

I've bought things from Bandcamp from time to time, and have never had a problem with it whatsoever. Its great for buying physical media also (I use it to buy vinyls from time to time) because the bands will also give you a free download of the album so you can listen to the digital copy before your package arrives. Wish more bands used it, tbh.

1) Free unlimited cloud storage for my purchased music (which mostly comes from Amazon in the first place) and no need to pay $26 a year or whatever to Apple to do the same thing.

2) The music is just that much cheaper. Bought the new Soundgarden, and most new albums, for under $5. Plus they give a lot of music credits for $2 off your purchase. I've bought way more music in the past 2-3 years using Amazon then I've ever done before, and I save a shiat-ton of money too.

I'm not interested in Spotify or Pandora. I love my iPod classic. 112gb of music at any given time without having to worry about streaming issues and can be listened to at anywhere at any given time.

enderthexenocide:i don't use pandora or spotify or any of those online music services. i torrent albums from pirate bay, and then if i like them, i purchase them from amazon. sometimes i just buy the mp3s, but i also buy physical albums. whenever possible, i buy the albums at concerts because that way the band gets all the money from the sale.

The band usually has to split the merch with the venue, and the smaller the band, the bigger the cut the venue takes. If you want the band to keep most, if not all, buy from their website.

ReapTheChaos:Oh goody, another article with a musician biatching about not getting paid for something he did 25 years ago.

I think the point was more that some people are using these services under the impression that it is paying the artists. While that is true, it is more or less paying them a pittance and isn't really much better than a crappy royalty check from a record label. [cue Steve Albini chart] Granted, a small band like Galaxie 500 is probably never going to be a cash cow for anyone, but he linked to his bandcamp page as alternative to listening for free instead of more or less just paying the middleman.

that said, I do think that his argument somewhat misses the appeal of spotify, et al. in that they provide a mobile service.

for streaming, I'm a huge fan of the tune in radio app, which is basically a slick interface that seems to stream a lot of the same stuff as shoutcast. It's search is pretty good at finding radio stations and podcasts.

Also, Dood's Music is a pretty slick app for streaming from the grooveshark data base. Of course, it depends if the stuff you want to listen to is actually available via any of these services.

The Evil That Lies In The Hearts Of Men:Jones_Boy: For Pandora, they received $0.21 for 7800 plays, which equates to $0.002 per play.On radio, they receive $0.005 per play, and he is biatching about the difference.

Thanks :) I was going to come in to ask what royalties a band could expect if a radio station with 7000 listeners played their song once.

Even still...on Pandora it's being played to a very selective group that want to hear music in a category that the band fits in, radio is more of a crapshoot. Also, trying to get your stupid little band played on a station was FAR more difficult in the old days than the current system where suddenly your nobody band is treated exactly the same as Springsteen if you've got the same "similarities" and catalog of music to offer. Never would have had a chance in the 90s... now it's so simple.

Pretending that Spotify and Pandora are the same is silly... Pandora is radioplay, just far more valuable and targeted. Spotify... that I understand being a problem of competition with sales.

I see others have mentioned it, but I thought all bands knew they needed to tour to make money nowadays. If you're not a big fish then you're not making money unless you're touring. And the big fish make ALOT of money when they are touring.

It's a silly argument - I would bet most people listening to "Tugboat" already own it, so he's getting paid twice, and a certain percentage were never going to buy it anyway. If Spotify didn't exist, he wouldn't sell 7800 more copies of his record. Will his next article be about how he's mad that people buy his album and play it at home over and over again without paying him each time?

Walt_Jizzney:A musician shouldn't HAVE to tour just to make money. That old bromide is nonsense. They should be able to sell their wares for a fair price to support their trade.

There are many artists and musical styles that don't lend themselves easy to touring or playing live.

That would be nice, agreed. But for the smaller bands hasn't it been this way forever? I've read stories of how the record companies have been screwing the little bands for a long time. The screwer may have changed but the screwee hasn't.

moothemagiccow:Musicians don't get paid for selling recorded music. It's been this way for a long time.

And rightly so. It's common knowledge that albums cost absolutely nothing to record, mix, master, and distribute. And all tours / live events, for the folks that even bother with it, are completely profitable.

Right. Why would anyone have the gall to as you, as a music fan, to spend 10-12 bucks once for something that is infinitely reusable, when you can spend 2-3 times that (or more), possibly pay Ticketmaster for being transactional middleman, and maybe even a Stubhub scalper along the way for the privileged of attending a single event?

kab:Johnsnownw: If you can't sell concert tickets, don't expect people to pay for your music.

Right. Why would anyone have the gall to as you, as a music fan, to spend 10-12 bucks once for something that is infinitely reusable, when you can spend 2-3 times that (or more), possibly pay Ticketmaster for being transactional middleman, and maybe even a Stubhub scalper along the way for the privileged of attending a single event?

1) Free unlimited cloud storage for my purchased music (which mostly comes from Amazon in the first place) and no need to pay $26 a year or whatever to Apple to do the same thing.

2) The music is just that much cheaper. Bought the new Soundgarden, and most new albums, for under $5. Plus they give a lot of music credits for $2 off your purchase. I've bought way more music in the past 2-3 years using Amazon then I've ever done before, and I save a shiat-ton of money too.

I'm not interested in Spotify or Pandora. I love my iPod classic. 112gb of music at any given time without having to worry about streaming issues and can be listened to at anywhere at any given time.

This. They just started their Black Friday music deals and they have had a lot of good $3.99 albums so far. I grabbed the new Cat Power and Soundgarden, and I'm sure the deals next week are going to be great. If you don't like the MP3 format they use and prefer iTunes AAC since it is a newer, better compression algorithm, you can actually convert Amazon purchases over to iTunes pretty cheaply using the iTunes Match service. You just buy the music from Amazon, import it into iTunes, and then wait for iTunes to match the tracks (you may need to edit the metadata for any Amazon Exclusive albums to get the titles to match). Once the tracks are matched, you delete the MP3 versions out of your local iTunes library and then redownload the tracks using Match, which replaces the original MP3s with 256kbps AAC DRM free iTunes tracks. For $25 a year, iTunes Match is pretty handy if you are a stickler for sound quality, and can hear some of the compression issues present even in high bitrate MP3s. The Match trick is also a cheap way to strip all of the Fairplay DRM from track bought off of iTunes previous to iTunes going DRM-free. Match, delete, and redownload and all of your 128 kbps .m4p tracks will be replaced with 256 kbps .m4a tracks. Hell, I was even able to use that process to basically "launder" a bunch of crap quality tracks I downloaded off a Napster back in college over a decade ago and replace them with high quality encodes. Sure, it is not FLAC or anything the true audiophiles will swoon over, but high bitrate MP3 and AAC format files are fine for my uses.

enderthexenocide:i don't use pandora or spotify or any of those online music services. i torrent albums from pirate bay, and then if i like them, i purchase them from amazon. sometimes i just buy the mp3s, but i also buy physical albums. whenever possible, i buy the albums at concerts because that way the band gets all the money from the sale.

I use pandora and spotify but I am the same as you in that I purchase physical media whenever possible.

Been curious about Spotify. Sounds like a really great service for musicians and listeners. Music should be heard.In my opinion as a musician, the money should be an afterthought, and the online listens just advertisement for the live concerts.As a counterpoint though, the Radiohead experiment seemed like a great way for a band to get paid well for album sales (albeit it was a "pay what you feel is right" deal)

Personally plan on tossing things up on Spotify once I get things mixed up. Hopefully it is still around then and with free play/download with optional pay.

I think the good news for the artists is that technology is making the creation process more accessible every day. For under $2K, you can have a home studio that blows away anything that existed in the 60's and 70's. Start with Ubuntu Studio or a "Hackintosh," pay Paul Davis what you can for a copy of Ardour 4, buy a decent audio interface and a good microphone, and start making music. Some things are still going to require additional outlay, like finding space for your studio and making the room's sound work FOR you instead of against you. But those things you can do yourself. Previously, the equipment side was an insurmountable obstacle.

Deadwing:enderthexenocide: i don't use pandora or spotify or any of those online music services. i torrent albums from pirate bay, and then if i like them, i purchase them from amazon. sometimes i just buy the mp3s, but i also buy physical albums. whenever possible, i buy the albums at concerts because that way the band gets all the money from the sale.

The band usually has to split the merch with the venue, and the smaller the band, the bigger the cut the venue takes. If you want the band to keep most, if not all, buy from their website.

i was not aware of that. if that's the case, then the venue should give the band a cut of any alcohol sales.